I'm Being Eaten By A Spider Queen (And I Don't Like It One Bit!) by L 2011-09-03T15:47:00
Awesome! Very different. I felt quite naughty after getting the biologically dubious ending, haha.
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → Users → Jedi
| Year | LD | Theme | Game | Division | Rank | Ov | Fu | In | Th | Gr | Au | Hu | Mo | Cm | Co | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2016 | 35 | Shapeshift | Nice Weather We're Having | jam | ||||||||||||
| 2014 | 31 | Entire Game on One Screen | Clay Pigeon Hunter 2k14 | jam | ||||||||||||
| 2014 | 30 | Connected Worlds | Mega Golf | jam | 504 | 3.03 | 3.57 | 3.39 | 2.17 | 2.46 | 2.83 | 3.28 | 2.50 | 54 | ||
| 2014 | 29 | Beneath the Surface | Marine Murderologist | jam | ||||||||||||
| 2013 | 28 | You Only Get One | Justin Beiber Presents: Justin Beiber in, Justin Beiber-Ball starring Justin Beiber: Mad Swag edition | jam | 495 | 2.39 | 2.15 | 3.10 | 2.21 | 2.24 | 1.88 | 3.10 | 2.00 | 69 | ||
| 2013 | 27 | 10 Seconds | Pro Crastinator | jam | 559 | 2.47 | 2.49 | 2.77 | 1.53 | 2.89 | 2.54 | 2.07 | 65 | |||
| 2013 | 26 | Minimalism | Minimal Adventure | jam | 35 | |||||||||||
| 2012 | 25 | You are the Villain | Super Goatling Poacher 2013 | jam | ||||||||||||
| 2012 | 24 | Evolution | Plinko Breeder | jam | 245 | 2.29 | 2.08 | 3.00 | 2.73 | 2.19 | 1.41 | 1.95 | 1.65 | 72 | ||
| 2012 | 23 | Tiny World | Particulate Planet | jam | 223 | 2.33 | 2.08 | 2.13 | 2.31 | 3.24 | 2.33 | 2.48 | 2.98 | 100 | ||
| 2011 | 21 | Escape | Escape Velocity | jam | 61 | 2.38 | 2.24 | 2.85 | 2.53 | 1.60 | 1.94 | 2.19 | 2.88 | 16 |
Awesome! Very different. I felt quite naughty after getting the biologically dubious ending, haha.
Gameplay is very decent. I thought the controls were a little sluggish though, it took my character a little too long to get moving and felt like I was ice skating.
The graphics are OK but incongruous, especially for the main character.
The music is very good but it's a bit too short and the beginning and end stand out too much.
It's too buggy for me to have fun. About 80% of the time I click to place a turret, the cost is subtracted but no turret is added!
Good audio though, and I like the movement of the "aliens." :)
I wish I tried the hard version first. The easy one seemed like a patience test to me. I still wanted to get the high score (on my first run) but even while going for it, I felt a bit like it's an anti-score; "This guy went the longest without realizing he could quit." :P. Tried to level off at 3333 but screwed that up :/.
The hard one is fun. Unless I'm mistaken, you have an algorithm that ensures it's always possible to continue play? If so, that's very cool.
I like to chant encouraging things while playing this one, hoping to hypnotize myself :).
As others have said, it's simple and addictive. With music, it would've kept me playing for quite a while. It was more fun after I edited the .cfg to give myself a wider view.
Letting us see each others corpses and scores is a really cool idea!
Before even seeing your entry, I was actually thinking how awesome it would be if someone released an easy-to-use library enabling internet scores in (LD48) games. *hint hint :P*
For the 1st two levels, I chose stairs w/o corpses (so I'd be more likely to survive :) ). Then I wanted to see corpses and went looking but didn't see any in levels 3 or 4 for some reason, despite there being 6-9 there.
In level 5, I saw two corpses: Fififox and Felix. Yay! :)
I died and I saw high scores. Yay :)
BUT I don't see where you shared your framework pre-compo as per the rules...
An unassuming little entry with definite fun and charm :).
Okay, I don't know whether to praise this game or condemn it but I've invested at least 3 hours into it and won't rate it until my rage has subsided.
*SPOILERS(?) AHEAD. (If an arcade game can be spoiled)*
This will get 5* innovation from me. There is more than one innovative mechanic going on and they interplay with each other.
It needs sound and music.
It needs to be SO much easier! I actually got into it; I think I understand pretty much every thing that's going on. It's still too hard. I had to resort to the strategy of piling up all the blocks I could reach next to him before I fed him one. But that's not fun! It's tedious! I tried it a lot both ways but it just didn't seem feasible without doing this.
He gets hungry way too fast. You might want to check that the logic is framerate independent and not decrementing his fullness each frame.
Okay, so even with this tedious, time-consuming strategy, it took some practice. However, I managed to get a nice pile of food in front of him and was pretty close to the top when I thought, "This is it! I can run for it now and he'll still be alive!" So I make it! He only has one exclamation bar! And... I STILL GET THE SAD ENDING??? WTF!? FFFFFUUUUUU!!!!!! What? He needed to not have any exclamation points? Well, I could've done that if I knew I needed to! Since, I've tried a few more times but haven't progressed as well because I don't want to stack food in b&w mode and it just pisses me off!
My biggest fear was that there just was no win condition. That this was some kind of art piece about co-dependency or something like that.
It's funny, because the media loves to link violent videogames with violence. Little do they know which games would actually drive me to it... :p
It also really hurts the game that the door isn't within view of the hungry block. You never know if he has more to eat or if he's waiting on you and you waste precious time in either case.
In conclusion, this game is fairly awesome, but I hate you for it :).
51 seconds 219 moves :). I noticed that after winning I'd win again in zero moves until I reloaded the page (on kongregate). I didn't like the audio and the graphics are a little bland but it's complete and it's fun!
It's innovative but not very "musical."
The camera going back and forth all the time is a real problem.
I feel dumb but I'm totally stuck on the level I'm on. (think it's 4 or 5). There's a bear in the corner of a room with a diagonal, two ways to enter the room and LOTS of ways to die ;). It seems like there's only so many things I can try and none of them work. It doesn't really help that the only interaction or feedback I get from the other bear is (camera pan,"exclamation point," camera pan, [be shot by invisible bullets now?])
.zip file appears corrupt. Neither Windows nor 7zip are able to extract it.
The music is AWESOME! The game looks really nice, too.
As everyone else has said, the controls hurt it. There's a real sense of, "I KNOW I jumped early enough and held jump down, why doesn't she make it!?"
If the platforms weren't at such exacting heights, it would be OK. There also seems to be many times when you require the player to jump on a block directly above the one she's standing on. Trying to execute that little maneuver killed the fun more than anything else for me.
Partly because it's frustratingly difficult but I think I also felt what you were requiring of me was unreasonable. I.e. moving in midair gives you more control in a game but it's just one of those aberrations from reality that make it fun. REQUIRING me to change direction midair, however, takes me out of the "reality," of the game and just makes it silly.
Rage-quitting aside, still a solid entry!
I like it a lot, except that the implementation seems a bit off or maybe just needs a little optimizing. The framerate stutters at times and the gameplay suffers along with it.
I feel that if that wasn't happening, it'd be easier to keep up with and enjoy this innovative game. My system is by no means new, but I'm PRETTY sure it should be able to handle this ;).
It was also a little light on the content side of things. Since there's a limited amount of blocks you can place, I really would've liked to have it look like I'm a babysitter that has to quickly rearrange tables, chairs, bookcases, the fridge, etc... :).
Aside from these issues I found it to be a solid entry.
It's a fun platformer but the jumps are too exacting and I found it unplayable on easy and above; your guy moves too slow and those blocks fall too fast.
It needed music. It should've started with the screen size at least doubled, if not tripled.
I beat the whole game without realizing it was a spaceship ;). Nice entry overall.
I beat it. I thought it was cool and innovative but only ho-hum on the fun level. The graphics are pretty nice but I didn't think the lights looked good, blocky as they were. The blockiness didn't fit the rest of the graphics.
The sound is atrocious, especially the sounds the monsters make.
My biggest gripe, and it may sound dumb, is the different passage types. I didn't like always having to think, "Wait, do I push F here or R?" Also, if you place a bomb and leave the level you lose the bomb. I felt like I'd enjoy the game more if the bombs just weren't a part of it.
I found it surprisingly rewarding :). The music is awesome; you made it with FL studio? In the two-hour time period you mentioned?
It's innovative but it just wasn't engaging me. When I saw how the scoring worked I didn't feel like paying that much attention, especially since I'd have to memorize the color costs or keep checking this page.
It's a cool idea but at least needs a better interface to be fun.
Innovative and fun. I liked the visual theme too.
Um, each link was to a 0-byte file :(
Shame no sound or music. The graphics are amazing. Everything is so well-polished, except for the top of the wave which is too pointy. Even with that, though, this game looks like it was ripped right from an NES screen!
Haha! So simple yet so hard and addictive! Sadly, my ancient version of Firefox doesn't play the sounds but they're hardly missed with a game like this.
I kinda like how the first time you play this through you'll do COMPLETELY the wrong thing with your keyboard ;).
I like it! I think I made it to ~wave 9 earlier but don't remember.
The music starts out nice but is too short and the looping really stands out. I could never identify what the rustling sound represented which really bothered me.
I think you make the player read too much (my game suffers from this too) and you should at least make the text you present to the player in a bigger font so it's easy to read and takes up most of the screen.
5 stars on innovation and theme!
Thanks for the comment. There are some bugs i.e. involving moving the window or if your frame rate drops really low it might mess up.
I wonder if what you're describing isn't what I would call "featurey" though ;). I worked hard to tweak the Star-Trek-(go-back-in-time)-slingshot-feel of the gravity and I like it for the gameplay.
Oh yeah, occasionally going out of the level was something I just decided to live with. It's WAY easier than, say, tiling the level.
I guess I can't edit my own comments here? (Or don't know how). Anyway, thanks again, Jacic. I tried opening a few instances and it's definitely a frame-rate dependence thing :*(. I tried to code for independence as much as I could. I think it's only the big skips that screw everything up. No clue what kind of system requirements I have but they shouldn't be TOO strenuous! Up Next? Physics in a thread with a set step interval. Didn't think I'd really need it. *harumph*
Thanks for the feedback! I'll say more in my postmortem but after watching a friend play, I think a big problem was my "growing up" with the mechanic of the game and knowing how to play it as I went (and not playtesting sooner).
For the record, BlueShaman, it's definitely not down to luck! (Unless you're seeing a bug, which is quite possible) I can beat the 1st level w/ over 90% fuel left about 90% of the time.
Thanks again everyone! If this game sucked before, please give it another go!
I've (hopefully) fixed it so it's framerate independent and at least rocks or sucks the same on most every pc.
It was a small change: I was updating the physics every frame feeding it the amount of time passed, now I update the physics with a set stepping (1/200th of a second), updating it multiple times if necessary.
I made this change so the game would play for everyone but RIGHT away I noticed the playability on my pc went up about 150%! I said, "Yup. That was it." ;)
I left the physics otherwise alone. I can now beat my own game about 25% of the time and, at least for me, it's always fun :). Keep the comments coming, please!
These comments are awesome! Please keep them coming!
I have a new version up, 1.2, that I hope addresses some of the issues you guys had with the earlier stuff. Check it out!
Andrew - thanks! Do you mind if I ask what gave you the impression it would be less fun than it was? Was it the crappy Paint graphics?
ointment - thanks! I wasn't expecting a high anything-rating :P. I appreciate the encouragement.
Rudy - I know they don't look like stars, that's why they're labeled :P. Glad it made you laugh. Better appearance is something that's definitely in my plans but I think it's going to mean getting some artists involved and probably moving to something more robust than SDL. I'm nearing that point now (and interested in suggestions) but I wanted to fix the gameplay issues first.
eli - Yay! You noticed my theme connections as well as my music! You rock. :D
Everyone else who commented here and who helped on IRC - Thanks for playing! :D
It's really innovative gameplay; it's a shame it's not more complete. I thought the attackers were too small and random to really dodge them. I liked moving a planet though :). On the whole, the game just didn't feel very interactive. You have no feedback on the power system (that I could see) and there wasn't much room for strategy that I saw. The attackers seemed to bother me the least when I just spun the planet in one direction.
A look at your timelapse confirmed what I suspected: you spent all your time with the mo-cap animation! It's cool though :)
In windows, I got it to run by adding the line:
#extension GL_ARB_texture_rectangle : enable
to sprite_fragment_shader.fs, right underneath #version.
It's a nice game. The music is really good but I wish it didn't restart after each death.
The control is weird. My character ends up bouncing all over the place when I try to execute some jumps.
This seems like a very good entry overall, my main gripe being how linear the story feels and that I couldn't tell how my decisions affected said story (both very common with this type of game).
I couldn't find a combination of choices that didn't result in my death. After seeing each of the final choices killing me, I had no inclination to go back and just try different choice combinations.
The story is cool (so far). You do a very good job of immersing the player in this alien world with just text and pictures. I was impressed.
I was sucked into the story and kinda sad I won't see it end. Just not enough so to want to keep playing.
I REALLY like the way you made mandelbrot 3D images into an alien landscape and especially liked how you wrote the program's operation into the story! :)
The music is kinda groovy but it's made with annoying sounds (hope that makes sense), it's too repetitive and it gets old fast.
p.s. Your captain is missing the wrong eye; the text says it's her left while her picture shows it intact.
Graphics and audio are great. I like how the music conveys a sense of urgency. The pits were to hard to distinguish from the walls though.
Aside from stopping when you try to go diagonally, it's a solid entry!
Short and sweet. Really funny. Great art and great music. I liked it!
Well, it's funny, I'll give it that.
Seriously, though, this gameplay is horrendous. Even with the supposed "spoiler" it took me about five minutes to make anything happen. When it did, I couldn't tell why it hadn't.
HTML5 is a really bad platform for game dev, IMO, ESPECIALLY Ludum dare and like triply so for this game.
I don't think any browser is 100% compliant yet and even if one were, I don't want to upgrade just for that. So, when I'm moving around a box not seeing anything happening, how do I even know it isn't just an HTML5 issue??
My ancient (but trusty) version of Firefox won't let me do anything with it. Doesn't respond to any input. Pretty title screen and scrolling clouds, tough :).
The gravity was a little too moon-like for me but I otherwise liked the feel of the game, especially the way you could impulse-slam into walls and bounce off them a little :).
This would be more fun if you were escaping from something, say an enemy or rising water, etc. It seems pretty pointless when escaping the room I'm in just takes me to another (well, the same) room to escape (but you already said it's not done).
The graphics were cohesive and the background was really good. I really like the sad expression on the robot and his animation. Good choice of chip-tunes. Great entry for a fellow first-timer :).
I like it. It's innovative and the story / puzzle is very creative. Good job with the music!
*SPOILER!*
It would've been slightly more cathartic to be reunited with the woman at the end and have her let you choose your final form.
I share others' opinion of the navigation being weird at first. Also, when I was given the first two choices, I felt that the menu scheme was unintuitive. I expected the brighter text to be what I selected. Once you're given three choices, it's more obvious which one is highlighted.
I like the variety of projectiles but as others have said, the bullets are often invisible. As is the white text on very light blue background.
p.s. I forgot to mention how much I totally love that you don't make me tap a fire key all the time. I'm bumping your fun rating up for that.
Good 1st entry but just say no to mindless key tapping!!
It's really well-polished and fairly fun. I really like the rotationy-animation :).
My biggest gripe is that the game is a little hard to control. It takes a little too long to jump and you stay in the air a little too long, IMHO. It was still fun to beat. 4* overall.
I really like the charming, animated-notebook-paper feel of the game. There's just too much going on though, both in terms of gameplay and especially what's on the screen! The same game with a sparser (or more spaced-out) level probably would have been more fun. Per-pixel collisions probably would've helped a boatload as well.
You added color to some things, which was cool, but it seemed pretty random as to what had color and I felt like there needed to be more (or less). I'd have expected what was colored to fit into a category. Like, just the HUD has color or HUD stuff and items you can pick up are colored, background and animals are not (or something).
The collisions just seemed - weird. When so many trees and bushes and junk were overlapping and almost-overlapping on the screen, figuring out were you could walk was a bit of a guessing game.
I managed to invent a firestarter but that's it. Despite having _plenty_ of flammable inventory and environment, I was just told there was nothing to set on fire, which was quite frustrating.
Actually after writing that I realized I needed to go back and BUILD the firestarter. So I did. I had to get more rocks (guess I used up the ones I had on a non-functional prototype?) and was told "now I can build fire." What'd that do? I don't see "Fire" on the build menu. Where's my fire!?
Ultimately, this game shows promise. It's innovative. If it were simpler and easier to get into, and had sound, I'd like it more. Picking up stuff you can find on a deserted island and combining them to build inventions that ultimately lead to your escape (I assume) has got to be the best integration of theme I've seen so far. 5* there.
Ah, this takes me back :). It just needs some cheesy chip-tunes of yankee-doodle and the like and it'd be perfect!
I second the issue of the space bar; you should maybe not let dialog be skipped if space is already being held. Then again, that stuff isn't so important to the game in the grand scheme and just skipping it all and looking at the stats was better toward the end. An option or multiple keys would have been best.
Overall, I found it to be fun and addictive. After about 30 minutes of fine-tuning, I made it to the base! :D There's no win screen though, you just don't go any further :*(. The lack of music and sound effects was also really disappointing.
I would have liked the choices to be more meaningful and perhaps a way of leveling out the randomization. It'd be nice if your choice boiled down to, "Gas or food/water" instead of, "Dumb choice or smart choice."
The game is often frustrating and addictive but in a not-so-rewarding way. Then again, so was The Oregon Trail! :)
Yeah, the compo was too slow. V1.1 is fun but the gameplay feels a little lacking. The puzzles weren't too hard; I beat it the first time with 15 seconds left.
The tutorial levels are really tedious and I felt my main incentive for finishing the game was to ensure I didn't play them again. I hope you respawn the player from the 90 second mark (I didn't check).
If there was one more gameplay element going on, say shooting some soldiers, it would've been much more captivating.
The audio hurts my ears.
Overall, it's fairly complete so that makes it a good 1st entry :). The post-compo version is fun, too.
I didn't like to always have to be tapping a key. Also, I found the color scheme off-putting.
I thought the warning sign was a cool mechanic that was very-well implemented.
Good entry. It could have used: music / more sound variety, levels with ramping difficulty, reset key.
After I realized boulders can stay on my head until I move and (round) boulders will roll off one another if they can, I was able to beat it with some diligence :). It's a "fair" game once you know the mechanics, so the puzzles were very rewarding. Still, this would've been a better experience for all if there were some easy levels.
I guess the point is to memorize the maze and complete it in time? It's an OK mechanic. To be honest, it's not much fun with just that. The constant "Unlocked" sound was annoying and unnecessary, IMHO. Overall, it's a game :).
I'll give you this: your game has very small load times... :/
Charming entry. It just needed a little more variety of sound effects (which were great, btw) and some incentive to keep playing; like a few more levels, or even just showing the time at the end to function as a high score.
The scrolling works very well as does the illumination mechanic. A quick fade would've been perfect; Having the blocks pop in and out of vision was a little disorienting but not enough to count it against you.
I think this game really suffered from lack of music, since you're often just exploring and even backtracking.
It's difficult to line up your shots which is frustrating since the enemy can shoot in 360 degrees.
Ultimately, there was just no "hook" to keep me playing.
It was fun for a while, though. I also found the visual theme to be cohesive and generally pleasing.
It's definitely innovative. I get that the bricks are health but never figured out how the light helps. The graphics are too dark and the black walls are very hard to make out.
Definitely needs some variety in the sound and gameplay departments. It gets boring quick and that "weee" doesn't help one bit.
The graphics are very good and very plentiful for a 48h Compo. However, I would've rather you spent some of that time you were making sprites expanding the gameplay, adding more sounds or making music.
Quick question: Have you ever enjoyed tapping keys in a game?
It's a lazy, crappy mechanic that should be outlawed from all games! (and I'm sorry to pick on your game specifically for it)
The way you make the player move at ~1 pixel / second, the way I don't get insight into what I'm doing, the way you tell me to tap e to use an item but when I'm standing in front of the only item in the room tapping e just seems to make me disappear faster... all these things make it seem like you and your game hate me, the player. What did I do to offend you?
I read in your postmortem that this was, "Not intended to be" fun. I can't tell if that's some kind of rationalization or just a really bad idea IMO.
Sorry if it seems like I'm laying into you hard. It's because I really like the artwork and audio and sense there's something really cool in there that wants to escape these flaws...
As mentioned, animations would be nice but I found it to be, short, simple and charming as-is :).
In-game music is the only way it's really lacking, IMHO. A little more challenge wouldn't hurt either but I thought having to gather food was enough, possibly perfect for LD.
I especially liked the visual theme and look of the character :).
Ok, you made some n00b mistakes on distribution but I think we've all been there. First, you distributed a debug build and not a release.
Debug builds rely on debug .dll's which aren't meant to be distributed - hence, nobody without your exact version of MSVC will have them.
Distributing a release build will often suffice if you're just using msvc's libraries (most systems will already have these) but to be thorough, you really should distribute the runtimes with your distributions. See:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms235265.aspx
and
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms235291.aspx
Following those instructions, I built a release for you and included it's dependencies, msvcr80.dll and msvcp80.dll. (Hey, I need to do this for my game, too! ) Link's at the bottom.
As to the actual game:
I could stand the screen shake effect for all of about 1 second. I commented that out so your game would be playable.
The end screen doesn't display on a win condition; you never loaded it.
The sprites are good and the gameplay isn't the worst. Hope you do better next time.
I went ahead and zipped a release build so anyone can play it. I also include another version that fixes the issues I mention above.
Here it is:
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=ARJQVPP8
Really cool! Don't know why more people haven't rated this.
I think there needs to be more challenge to the drilling stage. Maybe just more speed on everything.
As it is, it just seems like a patience game to get 100 fuel and as much money as you want.
Sadly, the game would always crash with a white screen after this stage for me :(.
Also, it needs sound and music!
I really like this one. I think of this as the "perfect" first-time entry. Everything you expect to see in a good, finished game is there. The graphics, the music, the levels - nothing is extraordinary but they all come together to really get the job done. The gameplay seems well-polished to me and it's very rewarding to stomp your enemies and bounce off a little.
I felt like you spent your 30hrs very well and put just the right amount of polish where it needed to go.
Funny! Nice job for 6 hours!
I LOL'ed when I died at storylet 30. Still not sure if I beat the game or not though...
I really liked the graphics and the way the platform broke after a while. I think that should've happened sooner (with the game finishing sooner as well).
I didn't like the way the dwarves pushed me if I was standing still.
My biggest complaint is that the gameplay just doesn't feel very rewarding. It's hard to tell what to do at first, then once you "get it" it stops being much fun. I did manage to "only" let 44 / 200 escape (200 is WAY too many dwarves, IMHO).
After seeing "game over," I was told to check the log for errors. Here's the log:
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "Dare.py", line 178, in <module>
File "character.pyo", line 21, in __init__
pygame.error: Couldn't open resources/testchar/front_1.png
This was my 1st LD as well; congrats on finishing!
"I'm new to this so my only goal was to have SOMETHING that could technically be called a game by the end."
And with that goal in mind, I think you've succeeded! This is really innovative and fun. I made it to the level on your screenshot and found it pretty impossible, though.
It doesn't seem finished but it's a good first attempt. The weirdest thing I noticed was that it would pause for about 1/4 to 1/2 a second every 3 to 5 seconds :/.
It seems really cool but really involved. I'm going to have to give it another look later. One thing I really wish for is a faster way to input commands. Being able to press the up and down arrows to scroll through previous entries would help loads.
Also, I had a hard time understanding quite what was going on. It seemed like I was getting updates about teams that had nothing to do with nodes I was connected to. Is this intentional? I'd especially see weird Purged messages that didn't seem to apply to me. I couldn't tell who was being purged but I wasn't taking damage. The messages will be cut off sometimes too.
Also, you use a really tall display! I just now noticed that I can scroll to the top and see my condition. (1440x900 desktop over here).
All-in-all, it's very cool and I'll be giving it a closer look next time I want to get immersed in a hacking game (pretty soon) :).
...This one is pretty addictive. The RPG element is cool. My display problems were from my console using a bigger font by default. I also realized that you can type just the beginnings of commands :).
My biggest complaint is that it's too hard. Especially leveling up. I've played the game probably 20-30 times now and always go after high storage systems but I was only able to find programs that were of use 3 times. I also died once hacking into the first node I was connected to :/. Maybe I could've lived if I tunneled through it? I die a lot in this, not sure if I'm still missing some strategy.
It's a problem that you're dumped to the desktop every time the game is over. Also, if you over connect to your home node circuitously, you're totally screwed.
Problems aside, I like this but never feel like I'm making much headway before I die with each play. I'd really love to see this balanced and developed further.
Oy! That's the last time I'll be able to just dive into a game without reading the comments >:(. TrendMicro's House Call also detects this as Parite. It doesn't detect the YoYoGames version as such and it's able to repair the initial version without breaking the game in any way that I can see. These things coupled with the fact that NUMEROUS different anti-virus scanners are reporting this means the odds of it being a false-positive are somewhat low, IMHO. Which leads me to ask, WHY THE FUCK DO YOU STILL LINK TO A POSSIBLY INFECTED FILE WITH NO WARNING?!!
Excuse me if that seems rude but I just wasted 2+ hours of my life making sure your entry didn't leave an infection. Parite is polymorphic so the fact that I didn't find anything is actually not much relief. I hope it's a false-positive or (more likely) that the virus just doesn't know how to properly infect gamemaker .exe's. At any rate, you've had many people tell you this file is suspect and you managed to make a non-suspect version, so pull this file down. Or, if you made changes, make a note in the link that the file may be infected. And scan your computer. These things should just be common sense.
As for the game: very cool idea, decent gameplay and graphics, crappy sound. The biggest problem is the camera. It often ends up where you don't want it and there is no way to control it. You end up having to toss the world all around the level just to see what's there. Also, you need to click to reset the planet sometimes but if you release, you end up throwing the planet instantly.
Playing as evil needs to offer bigger bonuses for coffee cups and fans. The best strategy ends up being to just toss the ball into the ground nonstop, which is no fun at all. Playing as good just seems impossibly difficult at times. Having to go back into a warp to go to a new place is unintuitive. I never did figure out how to get past the level with robots on the couch.
Thanks for responding and playing my game. Sorry again if I was too harsh, I was just grumpy from worrying about a virus :P.
DO scan your system, that virus might be preventing other executables from running properly - like mine(?). You can google Trend Micro House Call - it's a free scanner and a very decent one in my experience.
You're welcome :D. Thanks for the award!
One other bit of advice: since you had a virus, it's probably pretty likely that you have some other malware too. Two good malware scanners that have free versions are Malwarebytes Anti-Malware and Lavasoft's Ad-Aware.
Cheers! :)
Step 1: Install latest Love2D.
Step 2: Extract .exe.
Step 3: Find Lizard.lua and change lizard's color to be white
Step 4: Realize this isn't what I want to be doing with my life :(
Well, I really, really don't understand the point of making your character a pixel. Less of making it a pixel that blends into the background (I'm not exaggerating; the lizard has an alpha value!). Maybe you can see it easier than your players. Did you perhaps develop this on a netbook?
Note to self: NEVER vote up "Tiny character" as a theme.
After Several's excellent review, I was DETERMINED to make sense of the game. I usually can when everyone else has given up. However, even after making my lizard visible and peeking at the source, I just can't get it. It seems like the point is to meet the humans up but there just isn't enough feedback into any part of the process and you can never tell if your making progress or if the game has restarted or if something else happened altogether.
It's frustrating because I can't help but sense that there's a really innovative game here, if it was understandable. I could keep poring over the source until I get it but at some point I gotta cut my losses and move on :(.
The music is great and I liked the clouds and edge effects. Somehow, the mood reminded me of feudal Japan.
The potential is there but the gameplay needs a lot more polish for it to be fun. The controls seemed sloppy in that, hard-to-define way. I stopped playing after a platform I was standing on moved out from underneath me.
The audio is good. The graphics are certainly not bad but there's something I don't like about them, like everything is too shiny or something and it feels very artificial. Also, the tiny ship and buildings are nice but they really don't do enough to give a sense of scale.
Even though I don't think it's much fun, it's REALLY hard to make an FPS-like game in 72h; good job on this!
The graphics, mood and audio are all excellent.
It's cool but I kept getting "autumn come" soooooo often.
I was able to "solve" some of the levels semi-logically: fisherman, windmasters and tree-dwellers. After that, I just got frustrated. I made a "leaky world" a hundred different ways but got really tired of being told "Autumn come," instead.
Really, there's not much of a rewarding feeling once you start unlocking things, since after a point, the game just comes down to "Try everything in a different order," over and over again.
Fun! Good graphics and music, too.
I felt a little lost but I bet I would feel lost in space anyway. Was something supposed to happen after I parked the sphere? I didn't rate the audio because it wasn't working right on my computer
Didn't work for me. From a glance at the manifest, it looks like it requires .net 4.0 and I don't have it.
Hmm, I don't know on this one. Having the car(?) always move in one direction is kinda innovative and makes the game hard. I don't know what else to say; the game seems pretty incomplete.
Good game!
I liked the innovative mechanic but I didn't like (or didn't understand) exactly how it worked. I could lose four units in an instant to one enemy at times.
It seems a bit buggy. I played it through once and the enemies stopped fighting back altogether after I converted about 3 of them.
It needs music.
The graphics are very good and it really is fun to sneak around and take over an entire enemy army starting with just a couple of units.
I like the music. What did you use to make it? The maze seems way too extensive for the amount of oxygen given to explore it. Also, it seems like there's only 3 textures for the walls so everything pretty much looks the same. All-in-all, not bad for 4 hours!
Not at all bad for 8 hours!
Graphics, sound and mood are all really good. The gameplay, however, is almost nonexistent but almost in a good way. The lack of risk seems to fit the mood but at the end of the day it barely feels interactive.
As you say, its far from finished. I did like the idea of having to balance growth with difficulty but the enemies usually end up converging and you often run over the rectangle in the course of avoiding them.
The player ends up spending most of their time off-screen in the course of avoiding the salmonella, which is a bad thing.
I agree with what's already been said. It's a cool concept but it needs a little more polish to be fun, especially in the collision detection department.
Very nice game. One of the few LD entries I've seen lately that had me going back for more.
It starts a little slow but gets crazy and fun really quick :). I love the music. As others have said, the explosion seems to outgrow the graphics, at which point it's no longer fun :(. It would also be nice to have some kind of audio cue when you level up, so you know to run farther.
Very cool game! I thought the controls were a little clunky though.
Graphics are great. The interactive music and colors definitely set the mood very well.
I would have really liked some goal or more purpose to my exploration and some kind of a story. The controls are really weird, even using the arrow keys. My view seemed to want to lock onto the planets' poles sometimes.
An excellent entry! The music is soooooo good!
My only gripe is that I couldn't resize the window. With such a small window, I'd have to change my mouse sensitivity to get past venus. Still, it was gorgeous and fun!
Porting to another platform IS allowed in the rules. Just don't change the game in doing so. I'm sure nobody would be offended by a port from Java 7 to Java 6!
I still want to play it but don't want to install Java 7 just for it.
It's a very cool puzzle idea. As said, Respawning at the very beginning kills it, though, and I'm not convinced the time limit adds anything either. Time limit should be longer or nonexistent and there should be a button to restart if you get stuck - at the current level :).
Also, it needs to be more obvious when the player is going to get bigger and just how much bigger he will get. If the "poop" consistently filled the size you were about to be, one bite before you reached the new size, it would be less frustrating.
The sound gets old in a hurry. Good entry overall.
Hey, this game is kinda similar to ours. Incidentally, it's an amazing, innovative idea :).
It works for me on Windows. It's clearly an amazing technical achievement. It's also very innovative and ambitious!
Unfortunately, I felt that the language isn't very approachable. Also, it's hard to want to learn a new programming language and change the code that's there without any goal in mind.
It seems like you can spawn two things and select two algorithms to control them(?) but there's no indication as to what is the "player" and what is "ai" or even which script controls which bot.
If the object was to modify some code to defeat a very simple AI (who's code you can't change and perhaps can't see), this would be a fun game!
Opens window but displays nothing.
It's pretty much impossible to dodge jellyfish when you haven't built up speed yet. I frequently died without knowing why. Cool idea and very nice graphics though!
The best overall entry I've seen so far! AWESOME! AMAZING! 5 stars left and right!
It's just too hard! I'm stuck at the 2nd level with the tentacled-monster-that-moves-way-too-fast. It's much, much too hard for the average Ludum Dare game but it's one of those rare entries that's good enough that it can be really hard; you don't mind spending extra time to get good at it. However, this one is still harder than that :). I turned my sound off so I can respawn indefinitely and come back. I intend to beat this :).
The music you found fits the game perfectly, although it gets repetitive after a while, especially since you hear the beginning so much.
While all of the artwork is amazing, I want to say that I thought designing the character to look a bit like a rocket was a REALLY nice touch :).
On my system some game maker games display a dialog box stating that a sound device cannot be found and some sounds might not play. Dictated not read. ~Management
I'm knocking off one star overall because, as mentioned, this should be in the jam. Otherwise it's *stellar* :P.
It looks very fun! It's a shame there isn't some AI though. It seems like it would be fun to have to balance out the kicking / fixing / dodging :).
The graphics, audio, and gameplay fit the mood of an oldskool arcade game perfectly.
It's a really cool idea but the game just doesn't seem finished. It needs sounds and music and the two levels don't offer any challenge outside of controlling the ant being a bit of a pain.
I understand the idea of having to control an ant who has his own ideas about where to go but players tend to enjoy games that give them direct feedback. To make this work, your ant needs to always go to a patch of pheromone if there's one nearby and not wander away from it.
Didn't work for me, maybe because I don't have .net 4.0. I'm just told it stopped working if I try to run it.
It's innovative and the graphics are really good. The hard-to-controliness of it is fun at first but as soon as the game requires you to jump the fun stops abruptly.
Really cool idea and terrain editing but the concept of how you could slow the monsters down with water is completely lost by the fact that water BARELY slows them down. They just move fast instead of stupid-fast.
I won, after 3-4 tries but it wasn't very rewarding. Hope you keep working on the post-competition version!
I like it! :) Very funny. I liked the audio.
The gameplay could have been better, of course but the entry is very complete.
One thing that nobody else mentioned (maybe it's just me) is that I would expect the text to fade from black to white on the intro. However, on my system, it quickly fades from white to almost-black and stays there. It made reading all of the text very difficult.
Don't have an android.
The audio wouldn't work right for me at all. If I enable "Speaker fill" in my soundcard software, the audio comes through choppy as hell. If I disable it, the game is silent. I'm guessing this has to do with what Jeremias said.
As for the game, I really don't get it. There's way too little feedback in each part of the process for it to be fun. A town won't even update to show you've visited until you move the mouse away from it then back over it. I'm told to maximize money but am not told any of the parameters that determine how much I earn. I managed to get $437 (I think) but I have no idea how close that is to a "win." (Saying "Highscore" doesn't seem appropriate here, since, if I understand it, there's an undoubtedly best way to perform the task.
The visual style is very cool.
This is loads of fun! However, after about 7 minutes everything seemed to go haywire and the framerate dropped to unplayable levels.
Awkward play, awkward story. I'm left feeling confused and unsatisfied. It's very artsy, though. The music and graphics were good.
Addictive and original! Simple gameplay at it's finest! Of course, that music is awesome :).
I like it. I also liked Alice in Wonderland-ieness :). I had to restart the last level and when I found the key, I could swear I'd looked there before, even as a big person. Is the key placed semi-randomly?
Some audio would have really helped the overall appeal and mood of the game but this is a very complete puzzle entry and I enjoyed it :).
dr_Soda is right. I gave it some ratings anyways. It's pretty innovative but doesn't seem very fun as is and I don't see the connection to the theme.
I love the oldskool vector-graphics look! I found the game way too hard to control to really get into, though.
I had a great difficulty lining up any of my shots and would often find the enemies on top of me before I could do anything about it.
I would say, everything needs to move slower. You may want to double-check that your game logic is framerate independent.
This is really good! It reminds me of some bullet-hell games from Treasure like Ikaruga. The teleportation mechanic is innovative, and I like the way you designed the levels to progressively rely on it more.
The audio is probably the "weak link" here. Although the music is awesome, there's not enough of it and it skips around a bit and repeats in an unnatural way. The audio effects themselves also seem to have little clicks and pops, although the choice of sounds overall is pleasing.
Ultimately, I found it a little too hard and frustrating to complete. Level 3 had me restarting all the time. Prior to that, I found the boss too hard and everything leading to it to be too easy. This may restarting really annoying. Allowing for some extra hits before you respawn and respawning at the boss battles would make this entry even more awesome.
Final note: For whatever reason, I wasn't able to actually play the game until I copied the link and added a "www." in front of it.
Very fun! It just needs to progress much faster. My first try, I got about half way through (I think, ~chaos 8), and a score of 15437 (I think) in ten minutes and 31 seconds.
After 10 minutes, though, I don't want to replay it. I know I'd have to play for another 20 minutes to get to the end, and I'd probably lose the first time I see the boss (if there is one). Knowing in advance that I'd probably have to invest at least another 40 minutes or so to see the ending makes me not want to do it.
Mindfuckingly-good! :) +5's left and right.
Music is awesooome! I just wish there was more to the audio, like having the songs change on their own after a while because the songs are great but they do get old.
I think it needs a cheat-sheet for the rules. I will never remember the difference between ) and (, for instance. Having a way to play levels the community makes is sooooo great. I'd give you +5 community, if that was still a thing :). My only complaint here is that it's very hard to navigate the user-made levels; I kept wandering into the same few rooms and "hallways" and got lots of 404 errors.
It's not bad for 12 hours! Of course, it's not really a "game" yet - not having any objectives or obstacles that I can tell.
The look is amazing. Although, there seems to be some jerkiness to the camera or controls (or both). I don't think it's framerate related but I'm not sure.
Having a "lose hope" but was a very nice touch! :D
Simple and sweet; I like it :).
I thought that using toy soldiers to fight a serious war was a funny idea. It's also funny (to me) the way the toys fall apart. The rest of the mood is really serious though, so, I had a hard time knowing how I'm supposed to take it and didn't think the mood was as great as everyone else seems to. This game keeps insisting it's serious and I keep feeling like a jerk for wanting to laugh.
The way the character plodded along and shot people with exactly the same difficulty as talking to them was not much fun.
The graphics and audio are both excellent.
It's REALLY innovative and funny. I think it's actually more interactive than it seems, which is a shame :).
What Shadow said goes double for me, right down to it being a good game. However, I have to give you 1 stars and hold off on a serious review until you follow the rules and at least post the original jam version, labeled as such. And if you're going to make post-competition changes, having a changelog is nice, too.
Thank you for putting the original up. At first, I was very upset because it seemed like EVERY thing had changed except the audio. It seemed like you swapped out a broken game for a working one. v5 IS a lot more polished but I dug deeper after reading the first comments posted and I figured out what was going on. I'm now happy to give you some feedback.
Biggest issue:
The game is not framerate independent. It seems like if the FPS is too high, the game won't move along at all. This is why version 1 seemed so broken to me. I left the quality at the default setting of "Fastest." If I make it "Fantastic," the game moves along pretty good (though still not nearly as fast as in the video).
I tried opening up 4 instances. The game might have moved a bit faster but the biggest difference I noticed (with v1) is how many more buildings and enemies spawned. It seems to me that how fast your character moves, how much stuff spawns and how often enemies shoot are all framerate dependent.
My second biggest issue is the night effect. I think it's overused, in every sense. It happens too often, for too long and it gets too dark. You could get away with it (and it would look really cool) if you make the enemies and their shots have some emissiveness.
You probably shouldn't have things popping up on the horizon if the player can't possibly get to them. I think tightening up the turning radius would only help the planet to feel smaller, anyway.
The music is awesome and the graphics are good.
VERY innovative! I probably managed to clear ten sets or so and felt very good about myself for managing it. However, at the end of the day, I didn't find it much fun to have so little control. If "winning" means clearing the board, I don't see it happening :).
Like Geti said, it needs an offset; seems like the bottom row or two are always favored.
I'm surprised nobody else pointed this out, but by updating the game after the competition and not linking to the original, you've broken the rules. Please re-link the results of your work after 48 hrs, bugs and all.
As for the game:
As others have mentioned it is way too dark. I understand it's *supposed* to be dark, but this is stupid dark. I have to crank up my gamma about 50% just to play it and it's still a huge eye strain, even though it feels like I'm "cheating." I understand that you didn't want the player to see far off in the distance but you could have achieved that without blinding the player overall. Maybe you could've given the player some kind of a tiny light or torch and have a close fog (well, you already have the close fog).
The cockroaches seem very content to ignore me in my cell most of the time :(. I also had the crystal fall through right away. I was let down that I couldn't possess the spiders.
It's a really innovative entry but it's problems kill the fun for me.
Lolwut? I don't get it. I understand how I can press one direction at first and then another to pick up the items, I guess I just don't understand when the fun starts happening :(. I couldn't even see the globe; it's just two fists(?) in the air punching at falling items.
The game is supposed to be BDSM themed but it could be ANY theme - the gameplay has no correlation to the objects on the screen (that I can tell), it reminds me of the Angry Video Game Nerd's Atari porn review.
Awesome job! I beat it with a score of 3370 and I felt pretty good about myself afterward :).
I think there's a pretty good difficulty progression overall. Level 27 and 28 are really devious!
Good job with the music. Do I detect iNudge? ;)
The graphics are the weak link and the theme connection is weak at best. The trail on the "pixel" was a very nice touch but without better graphics and plot connection the game seems a bit sterile. There was one point where I felt like a lab rat after a bit of cheese.
A puzzle game is no short feet and this super-simple yet super-innovative entry is terrific overall. Nice job!
Don't have a smartphone.
Another black screen with Firefox after extracting all the files :(.
I like it. I'm surprised everyone had so much trouble catching the plane, it maybe took me 45 seconds. I suspect the gameplay isn't framerate independent. The music is good but the sound effects are too loud and are annoying. The boost never runs out, so there's no point in not pressing it.
It's very funny and a nice, short-and-sweet entry.
Really cool! Great art and very innovative gameplay. However, the finger doesn't line up with the mouse cursor exactly like you would expect, which makes the game a little harder and a little more annoying.
I managed to get 69 seconds but right before that, one of my "friends" seemed to just jump in the air to suicide-heights :(. It may have been that it picked up on the tracking of the red guy I was in the process of throwing; my friend was directly above the red guy on the screen. Unless the friend was meant to jump that high, it was a bug because he and the red guy weren't close together and I still threw the red guy in a different direction.
Very good for 6 hours! Good mood.
The gameplay isn't interactive enough. It's hard to control the little guy and there is not enough room to dodge the red things. If they didn't spawn forever you could run back a bit and dodge them but they do spawn forever.
My only other thought is that this is a very bizarre representation of conception :)
Very nice, overall :). I conquered the galaxy! Galactic conquest has never been so relaxing! :D
My main complaint is that upgrading the ship becomes a bad idea after a while, since there's no kind of damage or shielding bonus for upgrading and you end up just missing out on repair opportunities. You should have full health after an upgrade.
Also, I think it was cool how you'd have these different resources to manage but in practice, metal is too rare and becomes the only one of import.
If you keep working on it, this game could really benefit from a minimap. The only other issue is that it didn't want to exit after I won; I had to use alt-F4.
Really cute game! I like it overall. I didn't like having to be at a 90 degree angle to my opponents though; being able to attack on diagonals would have been the icing on the cake.
Hey everyone, thanks for all the great comments! It's really encouraging to know that the game is getting played! :)
I've noticed more people are rating the game without leaving comments. Please try to leave a comment if possible, even if you're repeating what others have said; it's really helpful to get the extra feedback of how many people feel a certain way.
Lastly, there's now a post-compo version that addresses some issues everyone had with the initial release. Can you please say which version(s) your comments are relevant to?
THANKS guys, you rock!! :)
I really like the charming graphical style. I also like the music and guitar-sound-effects. It does a very good job of setting a laid-back mood.
I liked the music and the "plot" made me laugh.
I agree with what others have said. Gameplay is a little lacking but very good job overall :). It's very satisfying at first. The fist sound was a little too rough for me. Not sure if you made it sound rough on purpose, like an old movie but it didn't work for me.
Craaazy. I'm going to come back to this if I'm ever tripping :).
I found the pops in the audio very annoying, and probably would find them more-so if tripping :/. Not that YOU said this was meant for tripping :).
Anyways, it's very cool but as others have stated, not really a "game" as far as I can tell.
I can't play it. It just says "LD23[/LewisThePixel] has stopped working" as soon as I run it. Do you require XNA or the like? Because I don't have it.
Even though I can't play the game, I got a lot of laughs out of the readme and listening to the intro sounds, so I'm giving you +5 for humor :).
Didn't notice at first but, as promised, it doesn't work in Firefox :/.
Really good game, it seems very complete. It just goes on too long with the same repetitive gameplay. The graphics and animation are wonderful.
I just keep winning without thinking. On the third play, I tried to lose but couldn't. My opponent just sits there and counts down; I win even if I jump in front of him. I don't think it's working right for me :/.
The story seems like the kind of thing that major sleep deprivation brings about :).
I love it! It's so bizarre and funny! It needs a lot more polish before I'd see myself investing much time playing it though.
Excellent mood! The game seems incomplete though, unless I'm missing something. I didn't like that the post-compo actually seemed darker; that's too dark.
Cool concept! Fun :)
I like it! It's a little too short but I won't hold it against you for an LD entry :).
Like others have said, the scientist in the background is brilliant and really gives you a sense of scale. I also wished you could shoot while jumping.
I liked the in-game music.
The intro text should move slower. I couldn't get it all on the first viewing.
The graphics were a little ms-painty but I still liked them a lot :). My only complaint is that the laser effects seemed out-of-place with the rest of the graphics.
Overall, +5, good job!
Very innovative game. I liked the graphics and music. Unfortunately, I just didn't find all the precision click-and-dragging to be much fun in a video game. That's for office work, which I play video games to escape from :P. Especially not fun was right-click-dragging, which didn't even seem to work every time it should have.
The game could be made more fun by not requiring as much dragging. For instance, if the green line is there, just let the player right click where the players should go. Also, for me, I got a lot more enjoyment out of the levels that felt like a puzzle: Pay attention and figure out the right order to evacuate the people in, then do it. Then there was another kind of level that I didn't like: It's shrinking OMG fast! Go, click, drag, go!!! That's no fun (for me).
Very good entry overall.
It won't get high ratings on fun right now but the potential is clearly there! I hope you finish this one.
I killed all the fishies with the fish-eye lens on. I thought that was a cool feature that added some difficulty to the game. Then I tried turning it off and noticed that I was actually having a little more fun because it was easier to control.
This is a pretty cool entry but it desperately needs audio and win/loss conditions!
Very good entry overall! Using the gravity mechanic and having the planet also increase in mass (subtly changing the mechanic) gets 5* on innovation.
I like it!
A complete FPS for Ludum Dare is no small feat! However, an FPS requires a certain level of polish to really be fun and I don't think this entry quite has it. Please don't take that too hard; I still think this is an amazing accomplishment!
The controls felt a little clunky. I can't quite put my finger on why though. The physics of the gun were annoying for me; it doesn't shoot very far but the shots reach their target instantly, so you can't tell at what distance it will start working, and end up just firing constantly as you run closer and closer to your targets. At the distance it does start working, all the spheres tend to gang up on you and start pushing you around and the whole thing just doesn't feel too rewarding, interactive or fun as it is.
You might want to check that the sphere movement is framerate independent; I'd be surprised if they are supposed to attack me as fast as they do (if two are attacking, I can backpedal but I will NEVER shoot them both before I'm hit, and I'm no stranger to FPS's).
The graphics are pretty good but representing whatever you are rescuing as a little pile of boxes is way too abstract. They come off looking like they're people but they're already dead or worse. If those are supposed to be cities than you should give them more detail and maybe adjust the camera FOV so that the player feels larger; I don't get any sense of scale from playing it.
The music is quite good but the sounds are really annoying.
Like I said, though, an FPS takes a LOT of work, good job!
Really innovative however, "But you will realize soon that this isn't a place to stay and you have to escape from it before you turn crazy." The answer is yes-and-no. I realized it right away but still played the game to completion. Now I've turned crazy :/.
Yeehaw! I really like the physics of flying up, the way you rotate slightly does make it seems like a jetpack. I wish there were obstacles that required you to use it.
The game needs music. The graphics are charming. It gets too easy once you switch to the rocket launcher, thoough. Also, there's something really weird about the way it's rendered, like, everything is just very jerky.
This entry seems very complete (although the sounds don't work on my system). It is a nice, short game but most of my time was spent waiting for my energy to refill. Having shots and shield drain your health is innovative but IMHO it is not fun.
As has been said, the controls were weird. Why not one button to shoot and one button for shield? Also, you wait until the player is in harm's way to instruct them on the shield.
The graphics are at that perfect level of Ludum-Dare-minimalism.
It's much better and more complete than anything I made at 13 - good job!
Awesome entry overall! The audio, graphics and mood were all great. Liked the sun and ship moving to the beat.
It took me a couple of plays to figure out what was going on. I thought the game was too long. A habitable planet doesn't spawn often enough. Precision clicking gets tedious after a while. Although, I did manage to save humanity w/ 35 years left.
Good job!
The gameplay was perhaps a bit too easy but it was sooo satisfying all the same! Very innovative :)
Graphics and mood were good. The audio was also good but music would have helped it immensely.
It's a really, really good start but it won't be fun until you fix the way jumping from a standstill works. Also, gamemaker games don't always have working sound on my system so I'm not sure if you have sounds or not but I think the game needs some :).
I really like the way you can kinda roleplay crushing the little guys. You can decide if you want to be good and save as many as possible or evil and crush as many >:). I didn't beat it but it would be cool if you got a score of how many innocents were crushed at the end.
Very cool idea and good writing! I also liked the graphics. The compo version is way too short to be much fun, though, since it doesn't really matter what you chose.
I enjoyed the post-compo version but I feel like I'd have to play through a few too many times if I wanted to see a win condition. Seems like you have no idea what a lot of the choices you make will do, which takes away some of the fun. (I realize that they probably IS meant to be part of the fun but I didn't want to play it through a bunch)
I enjoyed it but for some reason, replaying this one through doesn't appeal to me. I think it's the lack of sound and maybe the lack of any graphical action that makes it seem tedious.
I'm keeping my promise from IRC, Tau. Yours is even the first game I'm reviewing. Feel free to return the favor :D.
The graphics are awesome! The 3D audio is really good too, although it gets repetitive. After I finally figured out how to build that converter, hearing the music for the first time was awesome! The glow and translucency are really cool and the attention to mood is quite good.
The controls are more than a little clunky right now, though. Jumping is very difficult and clunky and it's exacerbated by the levels (I'm pretty sure they're random?) tending to have a lot of height variance.
I could never understand the shooting mechanic, except that it seemed like I could only shoot on setting 2 but the ammo and whatnot was a mystery. Most of the time I just couldn't shoot. I never could kill one of those gridiots but God, did I try...
Anyways, once the controls are polished it will be a very fun sandbox! Having an in-game tutorial / goals would also be nice.
Sorry, I can't play XNA entries.
I feel guilty for downloading this huge file and not being able to review it. I don't have XNA 4.0 or .net 4.0 and don't plan on downloading them until I can't help it. These frameworks weigh-in in the gigabyte range and that's just crazy.
From looking through the games directory, I will say that a lot of this content looks like it's been repeated, especially a large sound file for wave banks at about 36 megs, so you can probably shrink your distribution way down with some work.
Hooray! It's a fun little game that's way too difficult, but not impossible. :)
Good use of the theme! It just needed some way to start over after losing (or I didn't know how); I had to refresh the page to play again after losing.
I get the same as everyone one else in Firefox 15 :(
Nice start, especially with the graphics! I found the camera to be a little wonky. Other than navigating the world from a limited point of view, there isn't much challenge!
Awesome idea! Extremely innovative and true to the theme.
Good job!
It just needs that extra bit of gameplay-balancing polish.
It's pretty impressive to see an RTS entry!
I could stand the somewhat bad controls but I never could figure out how to fire the canons with any regularity and that was frustrating.
Overall, though, good job!
The graphical style of the game is great! The mood is fantastic.
Like ButtercupSaiyan said, the comic and movie need to be integrated into the game. The game is really frustrating and I don't see how it ties into the story at all, really. It could be inside any person's mind. This is about as abstract as it gets, but it reminded me of playing Sanitarium (which is a good thing).
BTW, uncovering the main character's self-deprecating thoughts proved to be a poor incentive to keep me going, especially since not-a-one revealed any specific plot point, so far as I could tell.
Overall, it's an ambitious project and you guys pulled it off. Good job!
Nice entry overall but there isn't much challenge or objective to it.
This is the most fun FPS-game I've seen in a Ludum Dare! Kudos!
I wish there was a little more of a goal, and I thought most of the weapons were underpowered, but headshots with the magnum were SOOOOO satisfying! :) I got 10450.
This is such a well-presented entry!
It looks like it would be right at home on the Super-Nintendo. :) 5*'s Overall, Graphics and Mood. 4* everything else.
I would have liked to see it more goal-oriented and less about trying to get the high-score. Otherwise, it's short, sweet and to the point. The perfect Jam entry!
I really like this!
It seems like it might just be a little too long, though. I put it down at level five when I picked up the fourth evolution. Before that, I chose gills, then claws, then couldn't choose thumbs so chose spike thrower, then I still couldn't choose thumbs so nothing else was available :(.
Awesome entry! All 4&5*'s! Excellent use of theme! It was really fun to breed those little guys, if a little tedious and demanding. :)
I played it so much, that I left it minimized and came back to play it some more. Shortly after I did, and did some mating, I got an error: Could not read file
monster_parts/body/5.png.
I'm still rating your game high, because it was a lot of fun despite the error, and based on the circumstances, it might be an error with LOVE and not your game.
It took me a LONG time just to figure out how to gather resources, because I expected that to happen when they fell on the seedling, like real life, and because the clicks don't always seem to register, so I tried clicking the resources at first but nothing happened. Maybe you should make it easier on the player and increase the resources' hit boxes.
As for the gameplay, this seems like it could be well-suited as a relaxing, don't-do-much game. I think you could make it more fun by making it like other relaxing hobbies, like fishing, where you pretty much do nothing for most of it.
So, you could make it more fun by requiring much, much fewer resources between each upgrade and spawning them much LESS frequently and making them easier to click (and move slower). I know that seems unintuitive but I think that here, since you are just requiring a fairly mindless follow-and-click action from the player, you don't want to draw attention to that by having the player do it a lot.
I thought it was innovative, although not very close to the theme, since you are growing and not evolving, and you really don't even have much choice in the matter. You can choose what order you level up each of the three attributes before unlocking the next level, but you can't go on growing roots forever or grow leaves until you topple.
I really liked how the resources spawned faster as you grew more roots and leaves. Makes sense :).
Overall, good job!
Very funny! Like you said, I sometimes had trouble telling what was and wasn't a mutation, so I would waste time mutating the mutants.
Fun game!
This one has been well reviewed. I'll just say that I like the graphics; they look very "clean."
If you clean up the repetitiveness, especially regarding the sound effects, this game could be very popular, I think.
Very good, overall!
But you need to get about 20x the amount of LE points for it to be balanced.
I LOVE it! 5*'s for Overall, Fun, theme and Humor. I'm giving you a high theme rating because the theme clearly inspired you. :)
Awesome entry! Gets 5* for Innovation, Fun and Mood. If this was a competition on which entry I spent the most time with, yours would win :).
It would be cool if you had even more control over the simulation. Especially how big the game space is and how the creatures act. It might be nice to have a random spawn check for each food type.
It's such a great demonstration of what computers can do with a few simple rules. :)
I really like the innovative concept and it was fun to play with but I found it too hard to isolate the sounds I wanted to make anything very musical. That parrot is really aggressive!
I like it but I can't play it for too long, it makes me a bit nauseous. :/
I liked the "clean" look of the background effect, it's very well done. I like the music at first but it gets to be a bit of a cacophony before long.
Next time, you may want to normalize your direction vector; I can move twice as fast in the diagonal directions. :)
In the future, you can edit a broken link on your game page. It's kind of moot though; I get the same error as hamster_mk_4. :/
It's well-polished and overall very good. I wish the polish was more in the gameplay department, though. It takes way too long to click on the next couple after you choose one. It would be annoying even without a timer!
Also, the genetics aren't entirely realistic or intuitive. L + M = S? I guess something has to, since I just lost all my S's...
As it is, this game seems Tetris-like in that, at some point, the player's death is assured.
Don't limit the number of couples that can be in the breeding tent, lose the timer and instead limit the number of offspring and you've got yourself a great game ;)
I actually LOL'ed a couple of times :)
Good job!
Nice game! It seems fun and polished at the core of it. I really liked the graphics on the special weapon, and how there was a lot of variety to the ship's upgrades.
In addition to missing an autofire feature, I noticed that the sound was jerky in Firefox, and that the context menu was not disabled. Yay for letting space do the same thing! :)
I didn't really mind the grain effect at first but I do think it makes me want to walk away from the game quicker.
Like Krobill, I found the yellow enemies broke down the "reality" of the game, and greatly hampered the fun, at first. Although, I admit, once I got the hang of it, chasing them into a special weapon blast did restore quite a bit of it :).
Overall, great job!
I'm using FF 15.0.
No matter how many cats I decomposed, my research ability stayed at 0%. Jeez, I'm not going to kill 1000 kittens just to satisfy that silly meme of a theme. :P
Also, I had to use task manager to exit.
I like the music, and the animations on the lab equipment.
Seems really cool but it needs some sort of tutorial.
What an awesome take on the theme and an amazing technical undertaking!
The only downside to your approach is that each of the levels ends up feeling a little rough and unpolished - but I'm pretty amazed at how much you managed to get done in 72h!
I love the style!
Too bad the gameplay is so wonky. You really need to get the controls perfect if you're going to require such exacting jumps and have such punishing falls.
Please improve this, and make more games like it! :)
Awesome, game! It's really addictive! I like how you managed to blend *actual* evolution with an arcade game! Great job! 5*'s for Innovation, Fun and theme.
It just needs a little tweaking. When choosing the next generation, I suggest putting more weight on the survival time and less weight on how well they damage the player. As it is, the player isn't able to affect the breeding that much, and the aliens quickly converge on tearing the player to pieces.
Wow, a simcity simulator for a Jam game; what an achievement!
Sadly, there doesn't seem to be much challenge at all. Maybe I just got lucky.
Supremely solid entry!
You guys sure are sadistic at the end, though! The mini-game was hard to understand and frustrating at first, but I felt the level of abstraction brought you a little closer to the theme, since you're not just collecting power-ups and getting stronger.
It's an amazing technical achievement, to be sure! I mean, really, really amazing!! The stop-motion looks really good and to think it was done in 72 hours - WOW.
Unlike everyone else, however, I didn't like the gameplay at all. It's just clicking through to see all the different animations; there's no risk or reward and not enough story development to give me any reason to care about or relate to these characters. I might have enjoyed seeing all the animations but I got frustrated from having to click through and watch all of the identical beginning and ending parts each time.
I guess it just wasn't my cup of tea, since everyone else loves it. Good job!
Really cool idea and I had some fun but I had a hell of a time controlling the ship. It seemed like you somehow programmed the game to pick up every creature BUT the one I was aiming for. I really couldn't figure out why. With a time limit, that frustration killed the fun for me.
Quite a steep learning curve on this one!
I had problems maintaining populations. I thought the way mutation worked was really innovative and cool but I think it costs way too much health to play with. I would also be frustrated when I would spend a lot of time improving my worm, and even if I was careful not to let it get low on health, some evolved beast would still come along and gobble him up a second later :(.
Still, it's an impressive sandbox!
What DaveDobson said.
Making your own text adventure from scratch is ambitious!
Unfortunately, it looks like you just didn't have enough time to get it working really well or test it much. I can't ATTACK or TAKE or LOOK AT, and I see a bottle in these cupboards but then I'm told "There is no bottle." What is this, the Matrix?
Would have liked to see the platformer part but it's a little too frustrating for me to want to stick with it past that, sorry!
Screenshot looks fun, but the windows .zip doesn't extract w/ Windows or 7zip. Seems to be corrupt :(.
Love the graphics, 5*!
This game would have great mood if the music suited it a little better.
As for the gameplay, I see what you were going for and I had some fun beating it. However, there isn't strategy or puzzle solving with the game as it is. There's a little, though, which is great!.
*SPOILERS(?)*
For instance, when you need to evolve legs the first time, if you just run each one to the exit, they die. That's fine; it's a challenge and you need to overcome it. If you just shimmy each one back and forth though, you'll evolve legs faster and can beat the level. The problem here is that it doesn't "seem" like I solved a puzzle; it seems like I found a bug and had to take advantage of it to move on. For what reason (in the game-universe) would shimmying be better than running?
I like the later levels where you need to figure out in which order you will kill your meeba's off, but the game quickly becomes a one-trick-pony in the problem solving department. Maybe there could be more possibilities if you had to do more than just reach the end. Like, one Meeba has to bring a key to another before dying, the other opens the door remotely but dies before another Meeba can actually go through. Maybe you could greatly improve the controls and play up a platforming aspect, too. I'm just thinking out-loud, here.
Anyways, it's a really cool, innovative mechanic where you have to kill off some of your creatures to reach the end of the level, and I can kind of see the theme connection. I hope you keep working on this!
Overall, it's a solid, fun entry! I wish there was sound, and it took me a long time to figure out how to absorb ships at first because they die so fast, and because they always still shoot when you can absorb them. It should be more obvious that the ships are disabled.
I liked the rockets because they moved at a speed where, most of the times I got hit by them I felt like it was my fault (not all the time though; they could be a smidge slower) and I think, why not let the player try to shoot them? Then again, that would make there be no point in not always shooting, and those games can be annoying.
Also, I didn't feel like the missiles where really a step up from the spread-shot.
Overall, nice work! :)
@stevesefchick - Thanks for the early look-see. Check-out the post-compo that's up now! :)
@benderbinary
@MurrayL - Thanks for the encouragement! :)
@juaxix - Thanks! If you're asking about how the features were implemented, I'll get way into it with a postmortem, I promise. :)
@eyehawk - thanks for the feedback! I did plan to make them very complicated, with recursive nodes and the ability to flex each node a different amount, etc. but I got way bogged down in it and this turned out to be just as fun! I hope to revisit and use some of the more complicated code that's there. and...
@Andrew
@gritfish - well, getting jammed is kind of the point to that stage! You're supposed to breed a shape that DOESN'T get jammed. And, naturally, you need to compete with all the other chips :). Actually, I want to give the enemy chips AI and selective breeding of their own in the future, which should make them stay out of the way a little better.
I've also updated the game to check if you're not getting any closer to the goal and make it clear that you can press 'Enter' to go to the breeding screen. I also highlight the player with a green color now and improved the camera in the first level.
Thanks for the great feedback! Even if it's just to let me know you're a human and you played my game; please keep the comments coming!!! :D
@repstyle - Thanks for the feedback! Sounds like you chose an offspring with no control. How much control you have is determined by genetics (and also influenced by size and shape). You can control everyone on the choose mate & choose child screens to help you pick; I'll have to make this more obvious in the future.
@yettatore - Thanks for trying! :) I plan to make some changes that should make it easier & add a tutorial to give you some breeding hints.
@juaxix - Okay, it's-a-coming :)
@Cake&Code - Thanks for the excellent feedback! I improved the camera on level one with the hope that it would help some of this "stuck piece" frustration. Looks like it wasn't enough.
Next, I'm going change it so that:
-the enemy chips have a little AI and don't just sit there.
-the CPU helps out with the breeding so that most of the enemy chips in subsequent level iterations will be offspring of the best from the previous generation, instead of new, random chips. This will make the game easier and more playable overall, I hope.
-enemy chips that aren't making progress toward the goal will "die" after a few seconds (disappear).
These are all pretty easy changes to make, so check back in a day or so. :)
as before...
Thanks for the great feedback! Even if it's just to let me know you're a human and you played my game; please keep the comments coming!!! :D
@gritfish - thanks for the additional feedback! It's very, very helpful to know when something was successfully improved, and a huge boost to my confidence that someone took the time to come back and see what changed! :)
I agree that showing the stats, or perhaps even the actual genetic code, might be really nice. I've been trying to figure out some way to make the game easier, and allow for multiple difficulties, having that info on easy (and not having it on hard) might be a good way to go.
Game now allows you to see stats :). It definitely makes breeding a WHOLE LOT easier and should hopefully help make the process clearer for some of the people who weren't getting it before. I can beat the game in much fewer generations with this.
Hardcore breeders will, of course, leave it unchecked. ;)
Overall, I like it. :)
It's surprisingly hard! I just found it impossible to make any points for the prosecution and even as a prosecutor I could only make points for the defense. I must be missing something...
Also, an autosave before the trial would be much appreciable.
WHO GAVE THOSE KITTENS CANNONS!? >:(
Great job, but I can't survive more than a minute! :)
I sense there's a cool game underneath the surface of this unfinished entry.
I could hardly ever catch a smaller cell and they just seemed to damage me whenever I did.
Love the Tron mood! I have pastel color-blindness so I had to figure out what some of the closely-colored guards and levels really represented by trial and error some times. I was still able to beat the game with a bit of perserverence. It could be that some of the other reviewers are also color-blind, or it could be that your game is buggy and I took for granted that there were really more colors than I could perceive. It might be nice if you included some texture-changing or something to help differentiate the closer colors.
Overall, it's a great game and a fairly innovative mechanic. I was impressed with the level design; although you don't make it easy ;).
Using cross-stitch for a game is brilliant! It's obvious that a lot of work went into this, in a lot of areas! Kudos for pulling it off!
The text effect is so good that the first time I saw the first instruction page, I thought, "Oh wow, I can't believe somebody stitched together this WHOLE PAGE of text!" ;)
I also like the obvious thought that went into the gameplay; like how you keep your upgrades after dying, and how turnips don't affect your science carrots, so you can choose to ignore the "score" at first and just grab every black carrot.
I know a TON of work went into it, but this game is not without it's flaws, and I wouldn't be giving you good feedback if I just said what I love. Especially if you want to take this game farther, and I hope you do. Here's what I didn't like:
By leaps and bounds, my biggest complaint is the ground texture. I know that's going to be hard to hear: I can tell how much work went into it and I really like how it's made from random tiles and therefore, isn't a repeating pattern. However, it's totally visually overstimulating!
It's also the only graphic that has a pixel-perfect edge and not the ragged, cross-stitch edge that the other graphics had. So it ruins the overall cross-stitch illusion that's otherwise present.
Another visual complaint is that your game doesn't use VSYNC, so I can see the level being redrawn and it's quite distracting, particularly when the rabbit starts running faster. I would guess that all of those background tiles are slowing the framerate down.
I also felt that upgrades didn't have enough appreciable improvement, particularly the eye upgrade.
Lastly, the game is really hard to get into and understand everything that's going on, for some reason. You can't really grasp it from reading the instructions first and you really have to go back to the instructions after playing it to get everything. I actually didn't realize I was missing something until I read Puzzlem00n's comment.
Please don't let my complaints discourage you because overall, you did an amazing job!
I really like it but I was disappointed to see that you made the player charge up the lightning bolt. What purpose does that serve, aside from frustrating the player?
I played the game when it was still a WIP and actually liked it more at the time because there was no delay for the lightning.
Also, the music is choppy for me (Firefox 15).
Very clever use of the theme, 5*!
I quite like the graphical style, although I think there's a little too much outline on the platforms and character.
You really need awesome controls if you're going to ask the player to make difficult jumps. It would help a lot if how long you held down space determined the height of the jump.
In the post-compo, after I lost all my lives, the camera panned left and just never stopped. In the compo, I never could make it past the first rotating platform. Even when I landed very, very close to dead-center on it, it just spun faster!
This could be a great game with a little more polish!
Take THAT pretentious bullshit! So cathartic! :D
Love the oldskool gameplay with the modern look and mood! It was jarring at first but it grew on me :)
Amazing. So well polished and FUN! The guns are satisfying when they connect. The gameplay is innovative. The music and sounds are good. I'm all kinds of impressed with this entry!
My only complaint is that it's not obvious that the game can't be beaten, and I invested a little too much time trying before coming back here :).
Like 4xisblack said, your game's random colors didn't have enough variance. *Argh* My eyeballs hurt.
Having said that, the game is really, REALLY fun! I made it up to day 9, with 22 worthy sheets and one abhorrent one, and after understanding your difficult but fair controls I feel fairly accomplished - which is rare for an arcade game :)
I agree with Kurisu and Jellycakes.
I really liked the music at first but the game is so hard and you die so fast that you're constantly hearing the level one and menu music starting one after the other, and it makes them get old.
The gameplay is too hard but it's addictive and fun at the core. Unfortunately, for me, the game crashes. Twice, each time after a few minutes of play.
Yeah, sorry, I should have told you before.
The weirdest thing about my system is that I'm running Windows server 2008 (it's kinda vista-y, and I'd get rid of it if I could).
Also I have 8g Ram, intel chipset and nvidia card.
Buuut if I had to guess, other testers may just not have played it enough. I spend a lot more time than average on each game I play. I was able to reproduce the problem a third time, but only by dying and restarting a bunch on purpose. When it happens, it happens right after I die.
...And I'm just telling you for academic sake. Don't go fixing it just for my sake :P
Cute! :D
Like panurge said, it's a really lovely start, but as it is, there isn't very much gameplay.
Beautiful graphics and great mood!
I really like the mysty style and the LOVE the plasticine! The music and mood were great. I wanted more game!!
5* mood!
I really want to experience this entry in it's entirety but I just can't get past the ten second round mechanic, it tries my patience too much. It seems contrived because I'm experiencing the game from a first-person perspective. I didn't understand why my game character would just stand there and watch as something came to kill her every ten seconds. Or why the monsters would be so polite as to take turns. For me, the mechanic doesn't jibe with the experience.
I made it into the elevator but didn't see any way to make it move. When I came out again, I died :(.
Did I mention 5* mood? The graphics and audio are also quite good!
Beautiful!
I pretty much agree with everything that's been said, so I'll just add what I haven't seen any other comments about:
As I said in my comment to your postmortem, I love your take on the theme! Too bad you couldn't do more to show that time was slowed down during the jam. I know well what that feels like ;)
I would like to be able to jump. I understand that I don't need to jump for the story of the game but it would give me something to do while I walk around the huge world. Also, the first time I played (the post-compo) I got stuck in a ravine. Since you were using Unity, I knew you had access to a ready-made first person controller that could jump, and that you probably disabled jumping. At first I thought that was weird but then I thought it was really annoying when I got stuck.
Buuuuuut I just realized two things: Your game time is moving at one second per minute of real time so if your player jumped they should really stay in the air for minutes (can't have that!) and your game character is actually moving very, VERY fast in the game world :D
Overall, awesome game!
Well, it's a really a shame the banner ad is larger than the game, but you blow the window up and hey, there's a solid little platformer here! With nice music and nice mood to boot :)
The mood kinda reminded me of C&C, with the baldheaded maniacal overlord.
I agree with what's been said; It's fun enough that I got a few endings but didn't feel it would be worthwhile to get them all.
Very nice mood and music!
It's very simple; I love it. I killed a lot of people with my lack of math knowledge :)
I agree with ramoncb, some levels NEED hints (the color change on the pillars is too subtle - especially for me, as I have slight colorblindness) but having each level spell out the exact goal felt insulting. Maybe you could offer a hint on a button press, or after x tries, or just on the levels that need them.
I played through the post-compo version, and got as far as the pulse level (which never responded in the way I expected, in either version) on the compo version.
I think your use of a series of very simple puzzles / games is PERFECT for Ludum Dare! Although, I do agree with what Morusque said about the controls.
For instance, I have to attempt the eclipse level a few times but it doesn't feel like it was my fault for not getting it the first couple of times, so as a player, I feel like I'm being punished unfairly.
I appreciate the changes you made post-compo and I'm VERY impressed with what you finished during the jam!
Overall - AWESOME!
Very nice submission! Excellent mood and I really appreciate how you came up with an idea that was innovative but easy to execute.
The ending had me scratching my head - it taunts me to replay but when I tried the win condition wasn't cleared - but I won't complain too much :P
Wooooaaaaah! An acid flashback! D:
As has been said, the hitbox on the (green) burritos is too big.
Overall, I liked it :)
73.71 seconds.
I hated having the screen flash out every ten seconds and I didn't even realize until I came back here that it had anything to do with the game - I just figured aliens kill you after a certain amount of time.
Where this game shines the most is in its innovation, humor and mood. I love the idea of leading animals by throwing a ball! I didn't get far enough to need to use it though; I might come back and check out the postcompo later.
The game window was too big for my monitor (1440x900) and the controls are a bit slippery but the idea is really innovative!
The level with the hole in the floor had me till I came here and read your hint. I appreciated being able to skip that level with enter prior to reading it thought :)
Not bad for only three weeks of C++ experience. Level 7 is buggy and wouldn't let me push button the first time through.
I agree with Dooleus, especially regarding the hitboxes. Otherwise, 5* for humor!
You sure know how to keep a game in scope! I'm super-jealous of that ability.
Congrats on your first Unity game, it was fun! :)
This game looks really cute! I love how well you recreated the look and feel of both mario and zelda. Unfortunately, the game crashes for me every time a chicken touches me in level 2 :(
I love how you combined such simple game mechanics as "Don't step on the lava" and "Hot/Cold" so masterfully!
Kudos!
Very nice innovation, use of the theme, audio and mood!
It's too hard - remember that most of us haven't spent hours playing it!
It gets really slow for me (the fps drop) around when I'm scrolling the screen (in Firefox) for some reason. It really does ruin the experience, unfortunately. Since you used Construct 2, that probably isn't your fault though.
Like someone else said, I wouldn't know this was your first entry if you hadn't said so. Good job!
My biggest complaint is that a game this obnoxious shouldn't also be this demanding. I heard that fart noise a LOT before I gave up, LOL.
I agree with Ossi and GSM Productions. This is hilarious and I really like the game overall but I wasn't able to beat it because I kept getting stuck on top of the goal in level 8, but it looks like a big part of that may have been my lower screen resolution, as the goal was cutoff and difficult to see.
I'm VERY impressed that this was your first LD, good job! :D
It's very cute! I like the sketchy, anime style of the cutscenes but sometimes they were so sketchy I couldn't really tell what was happening.
I thought clicking exit to play was a little weird but I guess that's because my character is leaving the house? I also didn't understand why I had to destroy the bad guys' computers to advance the levels. I would've liked to see more variation in the effect of each weapon.
The interface is well-polished. The cutscenes are entertaining enough that I was looking forward to them. I couldn't beat it but I had fun trying!
I wanted to check this out after seeing caranha's review. Once you get used to the funky controls (well I never quite did) it's a fun little game!
I love the modern take on the Tron mechanic!
I really like this one. The biggest flaw is having to start a new game through the menu after every 10 seconds of play. If it wasn't for that, I would want to play a lot more!
It's really awesome! I ragequit after 73 deaths though :P
The effects need to be less random and more predictable. The "meaner" effects like zooming in need to checked to make sure they aren't in play too often. I swear I spent three minutes on one level upside down, zoomed in, on an invisible moving platform, just waiting for the situation to improve, and when it did, I of course died right away D:
In the last level I quit on, with lots of spikes and back-and-forth-blind-jumping, I felt like the platforming would be plenty hard enough with NO crazy effects in play!
I really enjoyed the music! I felt like the sound effects were just a LITTLE bit too different from the music, like someone else said, but thought the audio as a whole was a 5* experience by jam standards.
This game is brutal but I will probably come back to it. Good job!
It made me smile when I realized I was playing Pac-Man from a first person perspective! :D
I would have like some music and sound effects for picking up diamonds.
Like atgaubatz said, the colored lighting for the ghosts was a brilliant touch! It took me forever to find the last 6 diamonds but when I did, the ending made me laugh out loud. :)
I would have liked to see a moving starfield and larger bullets.
The music is really nice.
The gameplay is solid and addictive.
Congrats on your first entry and first game!
80,386 after 5:19 of survival :D
In my mind, you guys always set the bar for Unity games made during jams, and you did not disappoint.
I like how each weapon is so different that they actually have a bit of a learning curve. Like, I hated the recoiler until I figured out I could recoiler-jump backwards around the world in a hurry :D
The visual style is awesome! The sounds and music aren't really memorable but they do fit the game perfectly.
I like how you incorporated ten seconds into the game more than once and how that really impacted the game's core mechanics.
I think the thing this game is most lacking is a difficulty selector. I find the game addictive and fun but I can see how players with less patience wouldn't reach that point without an easier setting.
I also didn't like how easy it was for powerups to go bouncing into space; they're hard enough to get without running away from me!
My biggest complaint is that this game hurts my eyes and I can't play it for more than about ten minutes. I think it's because the FOV is SO HEAVILY skewed - but it could also have something to do with the bright colors. Whatever the cause, physical discomfort prevented me from playing your game as much as I would have liked :(
Overall, awesome, 5*'s!!
Thanks for all the great feedback!
There's now a postjam version with 10 second solutions; let me know how you like it!
Very addictive, fun game!
It would have been nicer if the basketballs were either less bouncy or disappeared after a while, as a lot of my shots were getting blocked by balls I'd thrown much earlier.
An on-screen counter for the number of baskets made would also be nice.
The mechanics are very simple and very fun! Moving the player back just a little after each shot was made was brilliant!
I played this one quite a bit; I managed to get 19 baskets :)
Good job!
As others been said: great humor, great voice-acting and music, great graphics, mood, use of the theme!
One thing that I noticed: for some reason, the voices only came through on my back speakers when the game started and were very hard to hear. Maybe because I don't use a center speaker(?)
I think I get it, but I'm not quite sure. I'm pretty sure it's awesome though!
I really like how the game restarts with no fuss, but it would be nice to get a little more feedback on death, and maybe to see the highscore in the top left corner or something, because once you die your score is gone immediately.
Good job!
This is an excellent simulation game! I think I've been playing it for the past two hours or so.
I REALLY hope you take this at least a little further and like ghRibacki said, let us play it fullscreen!
There are some little issues however, like how it's freakin impossible to find your way back to earth :3, (if you're lost in space,) there needs to be a way to end the mission and see your score as well as a way to restart the mission, and against all odds, I actually DID TAKE some awesome pictures of alien craft, but you gave me twice as many points just for breathing! :`(
See?
http://i.imgur.com/6REQE4F.png
Anyways, this is an AWESOME entry and I'm going to go back to trying to land on Earth now :D
p.s. My high score is 1941
I tested the jam and the updated post-compo, my comments apply to both.
As others have said, this is a really cool, innovative fighting system that is hurt by having ten second rounds. Particularly since you can fill up your queue of attacks very quickly and spend most of that time waiting.
My other complaint is that the game just didn't seem to work very well for me - it took so long to load I thought it had crashed and there were huge pauses near the beginning of each level which were distracting.
The graphics, mood, audio and innovation are all excellent! This was overall a very unique and cool entry! My biggest disappointment came when I lost, because the only option was to quit, and I wanted to keep playing!
Really addictive! But 20 seconds just seemed like too little time once things picked up, and too much time beforehand.
If the turrets were more useful, it would make the game more strategic and fun.
Issues aside, I played it quite a bit :).
Solid entry, everyone has already said what needs to be said :)
Also, I enjoyed watching your review videos! They let me kick back and take in some LD when I was eating, or when my wrists needed a break from programming and gaming. Thanks for making those :D
I agree with everything theholychicken said.
I really like these games that just kind of play themselves, and I think the difficulty level is good for Ludum Dare.
NICE! :D
It's really cute! It made me smile and LOL at the end. Good job!
Woohoo! I made it out! It's surprisingly fun for how simple it is. Good job!
I love it but some of the jumps and back-tracking are just a little teeny bit brutal.
The control seems really fluid and I <3 the muffin gun!
I agree with what's been said; it's an awesome execution but the gameplay itself is too boring and random.
I really liked the music!
I would have liked to see some sort of score when I won for this type of game. Other than that, it's incredibly-well polished. I love the look and feel of it.
Good job!
Very innovative! I think your easy is medium, your medium is hard, and your hard is easy, however.
I liked the graphics and style. I missed sound :(
The map was a little too big without more variety in gameplay but you ran out of time and I definitely know how that goes!
I'm not convinced the collision detection was working all the time. But when I did connect a shot, it was satisfying! :)
I really like the look and feel of the game but it just seems really buggy (on Firefox).
At one point my character jumped from the left side of the screen, to the bottom and through the terrain, and then back to the top and all over the place.
After wave 1 was complete, nobody else ever came. :(
I think some of these problems aren't your fault so I'm rating you N/A in all but graphics, (which is 4*).
It really does feel like you're just sitting and peeling potatoes :/
Very innovative but way too complicated. I read all the instructions and played for about 20 minutes but I'm still not sure I understand all the aspects of gameplay.
Nothing besides military conquest seemed to do anything, and I had to do that nonstop to keep up with those annoying virr.
I think there's more to this game than I can fathom, and I'm very impressed that you finished it in 48 hours! The pictures of the alien races was a nice touch.
Hey I came here looking for a joke game! This is instead a solid entry, what gives?
I would've liked more variety in sound effects and gameplay. The golden rifle is a nice touch but you don't get it soon enough. The screen shake was just a little too severe, IMHO.
Awesome game!
Well, all you promised was an awful shmup so I'm not disappointed :P
It's not so awful, switching weapons happened too slowly to be more than a gimmick though. Also, I'm against button mashing. I'm not against inexplicably winning though (Was I the alien horde all along?)
Way too difficult. On the second level, after about 50 tries, I'd managed to actually get the hamster in the air twice, but both times he went sailing over the goal and beyond :(
It's a cool idea and it's nice how fast you restart once you die. But I usually have more patience than anyone so I don't understand how people beat this.
The movement is fun when you're going downhill and pick up speed.
The combat was not the same experience though, I'd see bullets wiz through me and then I'd die after the enemy breathed on my big toe. (This is on Firefox) and once the game seemed to restart when I had half health.
It was a fun experience overall but I would have played longer if not for the weirdness of the combat.
Really innovative and fun! I got over 2000 points :)
My biggest complaint is that you spend about 90% of the time in the bottom 25% of the screen, just because of physics.
I would have really liked it if the game area were more like 3 or 4 "screens" tall and the screen scrolled.
Very cute game :)
I like the look and feel of this game.
My biggest complaint is that the character moves too slowly.
Also, it took me a while to figure out what the graphics were trying to show me when I shot my arrow, at first it just looked like something naughty.
Overall: Nice job!
It took me a long while to figure out that I was destroying the platform I was standing on and could respawn it with space. I didn't like having to use space as the respawn button, because it meant each jump would be a little shorter.
It's a very innovative design that turns into an overly-difficult game. Having the platform disappear after a short time is a feature that could have been left out!
I like the music and the mood and especially the clean graphical look.
It's pretty funny. Too bad it's unfinished.
On my first play through I couldn't get dialog to work at all, even after reader john_conder9's comment. I never would have understand dialog at all without that comment.
It gets high points in humor.
Brilliant!
What Guennor said!
Also, I think you missed a trick here, because there could have been some gameplay in lining up the n.f.h. and taking them out en masse, but you only do hit-detection as far as the first neighbor.
It has pretty good mood. I liked the music and the look of the textured Unity-capsules, haha.
I really liked it. I thought the limited number of each item made it fun but as others have said, it's a little too easy. I tried each item and never got stuck. It's also too easy to click teleport after play on the menu.
Three different items provided a good amount of variety to the gameplay. If you work on this post-compo, it would be nice if the story of the game dictated which items were used. But as it is, I think it's a good use of the theme.
Good Job!
Very nice mood, and I like the animations of the spacesuit. I'm not 100% sure I understood the story from playing it through once. Is that the intention?
LOL Spaghetti
What SonnyBone said.
Also, the credits didn't work for me. When I clicked credits, the credits button just disappeared and an exit button replaced it.
When I first starting playing it reminded me of Flow and I thought it had a very calming feel and innovative gameplay.
The gameplay and graphics are awesome, but unfortunately it has some balancing issues. For the variety in gameplay, each "level" needs to be over much faster. Something like twice as fast at least, because as it is, the gameplay gets boring. Not in the sense that it's too easy, but in the sense that I get tired of doing nothing but leading these animals of varying speeds back and forth. If I could tell the mice to stay behind or something it would have been a more engaging mechanic.
There's little to no sense of progression. I feel like I played at least ten, maybe twenty minutes after the fox was released and then I thought "Please let it be over soon" and I just stopped playing a little after that.
Really nice game overall, too bad I never saw the end screen, even after investing so much time :/
5* mood! :)
Haha, it's like greenpeace with vikings! Take THAT oilrigs! (Oh crap, will that leak oil into the ocean?)
This game is fun but too simplistic, as has been said. The graphics are gorgeous!
Restarting to the first level: Has never been a good idea (though I've been guilty of this too).
I wonder if the pun works better in swedish(?)
It's cute and funny. I wish there was at least one significant change between the options though, not just huh vs sigh.
It's hilarious! I could never really tell what made the nice guys different from any of the other douches, though.
I especially liked the audio.
It's an awesome, fun game! Too bad it doesn't end and stopped progressing after a while (or seemed too), I would have kept playing long enough to get my wall at full height if not for that.
Good job!
I didn't feel like I had enough control of my ship to want to go finding targets through asteroids. I really liked the graphics and HUD style, though.
Hey guys, I'm really sorry about leaving my warm-up game as the link for so long.
As I say in my journal, (and said in my entry when it was applicable) my pc died during the jam and caused me a lot of grief, and I thought I could leave that link up as a super-temporary placeholder to let me submit. I worked harder on this than any other LD so I didn't want to submit nothing. I made the warm-up in 72 hours too, so it didn't really feel like "cheating" to me in my jam-addled state of mind.
I thought I'd have a video made MUCH sooner but the working laptop I had just wasn't up to the task.
I hope everyone understands and I'm sorry for the confusion!
I had the same experience as Coblynau.
The movement and sound of the arrow is really satisfying when it hits a zombie!
I don't think I solved level 4 the way it's supposed to be solved but I have no idea how else to do it.
*SPOILER ALERT* (Though probably not) I drag the window off the screen for a second and the enemies fall off the world. But seriously, how do you do this? Only one bullet, two enemies, can't jump high enough at all to get over them, what am I missing???
Nice job on the graphics, 5*.
It's too easy, but I love this.
Awesome! 5* in fun and overall!
My one beef is that the chaingun is underpowered. I felt like I was better off with the shotgun.
But the game is really fun yet simple. The holy grail of LD. Kudos!
Yay!
I liked the minimal controls but the lagging input was annoying.
It's really fun and I love the c64 mood, it just goes on way too long!
Entries like this are what make me really sad that community isn't still a category I can give you a 5* rating in. Well, at least there's the one for innovation ;)
Really cool stuff!
Damn, this is awesome! It's impossible not to have fun when you're character is destroying planets and laughing maniacally! This game taps into that zen kind of gameplay and always makes me when to play just once more ;)
My only two complaints are that it doesn't capture the mouse and the slow-motion effect kicks in just a smidge too soon.
Excellent everything!
Great job!
Those elementals have some serious attitude! Love these graphics! :D
I got a lot of fun out of this one, but it's too hard! Even the post-compo, which I beat, is way too hard still! The compo relies on some of the worst parts of NES games: One-hit deaths and going back to the beginning. One thing I liked was that in the first two levels, you could find shortcuts to do them quickly. Making the player have to press z in the post-compo seemed like a step in the wrong direction but that's just my opinion. The sounds were very harsh and I'm not sure they weren't worse in the post-compo; I know that I didn't like the walking sound.
I'm giving your game a lot of criticism but I actually enjoyed it for 3 hours or more. Good job!
Excellent mood! I wouldn't be surprised if this places first in the mood category. The gameplay seems like it only really lends itself to one kind of puzzle though, and unless I'm missing something all the puzzles aren't implemented (I could only activate one) which is a shame.
But hey, I know how it goes for game-jams! ;)
Wow, you're so creative with your art style! This game is really just kind of fun to look at :) Not unlike your LD27 entry! (Now I'm going to have to play the intermediate two)
It could have felt a little more interactive with some juiciness upon picking up items. I felt the "can't take action" sound was a little too harsh. I may have ran into a bug because I had to spam the space bar above the hole before it would let me crawl down. Not sure what that was about.
It has a really great mood and overall, it's fun to play! Good job!
It took me a while to find the airship but when I did, it was fun to control! But then I fell through the desert floor :(. This game is way too big to have a bug like that! I didn't want to play it again, knowing that I'd have to walk and that I might still fall through, but I did play once more, making sure to only walk in the desert, and I fell through anyway :(
The graphics were pretty. I thought it was weird that my character reacted to a diamond getting destroyed but apparently not to his comrade dying in an airship crash.
Your game needs a loading screen, it sits on a black screen for a long time. It also needs to capture the mouse. The mouse also needs smoothing and to be less sensitive.
Very cool that you used a custom engine, but I'm not sure that engine was 100% ready for prime-time. Hope you keep tweaking it post-compo and have it ready for Ludum Dare 31!
Haha, best ending ever! I'm giving you 5* for humor which feels unfair to people who put more jokes into their games but that ending had me laughing out loud.
It could have used more polish. The buttons on the menus could have been animated on mouseover, there could have been sound effects. Also, sometimes enemies were able to shoot me through walls. I assume that wasn't intentional.
The screenshake and graphics were great, as was the music. I liked the idea of choosing different characters too.
Really good job, overall!
The concept is awesome! I didn't really like it when the ball got smaller; for some reason that made it harder for me to understand the gravity change. Like you said, I was left wanting a little more content. The audio and graphics are quite good, as is the mood!
It's a super innovative idea, and I had a blast playing it!
Took me a few deaths to figure it out. I didn't care for the buttony controls, but in a way I guess it's more simulation like. I thought the ship fell impossibly fast on the high gravity planets; maybe there's some framerate dependency?
Loved the HitchHiker's Guide references :)
I thought it was clever how you stretched the gameplay into multiple levels, and the backstory of each planet helps to make each one fresh.
I didn't finish this (my ship was falling faster than I could react once the engines started shutting off randomly) but this feels like a complete entry all the same.
Good job!
Really, really strange, but in a good way! :)
The mechanic was cool. It kind of reminded me of an IQ test but in game-format.
I felt like the player needed a little more feedback. Before you figure the game out, it's disconcerting when the levels start out, and shuffle around, and if you select incorrectly it just immediately starts over. It should have been more obvious the player was losing a heart in that instance. Then again, maybe the disorientation was part of the mood. As someone else mentioned, sometimes it seems like the shuffling isn't going to stop.
Also it would have been nice if some of the earlier levels could have been taken as writ once you beat a certain level.
Overall, it's a quirky, innovative game that I enjoyed playing till the end. Good job!
P.s. Thanks again for streaming my game! It was fun to watch and the feedback you gave was really insightful.
Graphics and music were excellent! Controls are responsive and fun!
I would have liked more sound effects and maybe more variety in gameplay because I got a little bored after around 5000 credits (far shy of what it would take to sample that Potato Salad). As someone else said, I wish I could leave the planet by just flying away, not needing to press x.
Overall, great job!
This is awesome! Love the minimal style with the tiny bits of flair.
There's a little bug that occasionally keeps me from moving one character left or right, despite how many times I switch characters. I wish it had music, too.
Other than that, it was really fun! Well done!
I found the end! If I didn't see the comments here first though, I'd have assumed I'd seen all there was too see. Pretty cool puzzle game! Unfortunately I don't know how much of it was original and how much was inspired by Antichamber because I've never played it.
Staring at that eye sucked a lot of the fun out.
I believe you could fix some of the graphical glitches by moving vertices of walls instead of changing the visibility of wall sections. Still, it was cool to see that you made Unity behave as if it was non-Euclidean! Kudos!
Great entry! I'm glad you shared this on IRC during development; it's been a lot of fun watching it come into being.
For being incomplete, it actually feels very complete and satisfying. I would have liked to have not had to start back at the village after dying, but given your lack of content I actually think this was a smart move.
I didn't like the way the guy's arms moved when he jumped. (There's not much critical I have to say)
The graphics were great, the audio was excellent, and that song was perfect! The screenshake was also really well-done and satisfying; I may have to see how you do that and steal your technique :3
It's a really ambitious idea but I don't think you were quite able to pull it off in the 72 hours. I managed to kill one enemy, but most of the time my attacks didn't work at all. It wasn't a very satisfying kill; the game needs to be responsive and "juicy." (You HAVE seen the youtube video, "Juice it or lose it", right? Everyone should!)
Also, other than getting realms named after players it doesn't seem like there's much to connect me to "my" world.
I wish the player would keep moving when I held down the movement key.
I never got a chance to see any multiplayer functionality because the worlds are too big and there was only one other person on when I was playing, and I didn't run into them. This is a common problem with multiplayer jam games - there being nobody on the other end to play them with.
Well, I suspect most of the work went into the online functionality. Next time, Keep It Sesame Street! :P
Woooooow! Sooooo preeeeettttty! Even short as it is, I did a double-take when I saw this was a compo entry and not something a team made for the jam.
Kudos!
When I first saw the game ANGELINA made for LD28, I was blown away! However, after seeing a few games, her templated nature is started to show through and her games become less impressive. There's nothing to collect in this one either and the "government" (lol) barely move, so it's kind of a step-down from the previous two, gameplay wise. I didn't notice before that she chooses fonts too! (I assume)
The game seems creative and moody - one of ANGELINA's more surprising strong-suits.
I want to see ANGELINA improve! These games she's making are all well and good, but it's not obvious to me that there's anything different between them aside from the input you've given her, and that this latest game follows an "Avoid" template instead of "Avoid and Collect." As she's getting more mature, she at least needs to get better at crediting her sources.
Looking forward to what ANGELINA makes for December! :3
You had me at "Star Turtle 64" :D
I'm really impressed with this entry! So much gameplay packed into a Ludum Dare. If anything, a little bit too much - I felt like the cave parts could have been smaller.
Excellent use of subtle player choice: players can choose to run or fight and choose from the weapons they have.
I liked the music and audio. The graphics aren't great but they do work with the game. It took me a while to recognize that my turtle was wearing a space helmet, but I like that he was! :3
Sadly, I was not able to finish it due to a bug - I brought up the menu screen and went to options. When I went back into the game, my turtle had disappeared from the screen :(. He seemed to be stuck at the top between two transitions but I'm not sure.
Still, I feel like overall, this is a solid, fun entry!
This is a nice, relaxing entry. The music really fits the dreamy mood. I'm not sure that the gameplay of shooting and dodging fits cohesively into that, but it does work.
There's way, way too much text to read! And really, it's all just window-dressing for the innovation of two enemy / weapon types. Which is an innovation I like by the way!
Utlimately this game is fun and very good overall, but only after you've invested the time to really understand what's going on. Once you do understand the way the game works, it actually goes from overwhelming to boring pretty fast. So, it would be cool if there were more gameplay elements that were introduced over time. I see that you kind of did that with the upgrade system, but the problem is the upgrades make the game easier faster than the vanishing auras made it harder. While I'm on the subject, that was also an innovative and cool idea but the ships did not move distinctively enough IMHO.
On the second play through, I got about 4000 points but got bored around the 4th stage. I think it kept me playing for about an hour, so good job!
Cool game! Really innovative!
As has been said, it needs sound. Also, sometimes the dot would snap to where I didn't want it and the level would restart. I didn't think precision dragging should have been part of the game but maybe that's just me. Maybe you should set a fraction-of-a-second timer so the player doesn't lose immediately if they're just passing by a point that's not in the design.
Also, was there an end screen? Did I just click past it by accident? It seemed like the game just restarted after the last level.
Thanks for the game and good job!
Like CommodoreKid, I didn't notice the gun the first few plays through. I think the problem is that the gun is inaccessible at first, and I assumed it was decoration that had something to do with the moving wall.
After finding the gun, this was a very fun game! Loved the screenshake!
My biggest complaint is the camera - it moves too abruptly, and the character movement is fluid but squirrelly. Given that and some of the background... was this initially going to be a Sonic clone? :3
The enemies got a little bit repetitive near the end, but the audio was excellent. Overall, a solid entry!
Wow, I didn't realize this was your first LD, awsumpwner27. Good job!
I felt like the levels should have relied more on puzzling and less on platforming to better reflect its strong and weak suits, but I know how it goes during the jam!
The little falling animation was cute but it kicked in at too low of heights, I thought. The graphics were good, but, as has been mentioned, needed to distinguish between foreground and background better. Not only should the coloring have been more differentiated, but the blocks in the background could have been made smaller.
Shame there's no audio.
It's short but I had fun completing it.
Overall, an enjoyable game with an innovative mechanic!
Really innovative! Take THAT laws of physics! :P
The player needs more rewards and incentive to keep playing. Popping up the text for the next "world" was nice but it wasn't enough to keep the game from feeling like a chore at times. Just a little musical fanfare on each new world would have gone a long way. And as a gamer, I felt like it was a slap in the face when I made it to the top of the largest tree but there was no acknowledgement from the game that I had done so.
The graphical style worked well with the game and mood, and the music was good too, although for some reason it was really quiet. Maybe because it got pretty repetitive by the end.
Overall, great job! Hard to believe this was a compo game and not a team effort!
Woohoo! Great game! The only problem I saw was that the NPC's would tell you to take things they'd already given away. Aside from that it was a perfect adventure game for Ludum Dare. Really appreciated the humor, the writing, art, audio and mood.
Great Job!
I'm calling it now:
Congrats on 1st place overall for the Jam :P
I wish there was a win screen and I didn't really appreciate the fail counter, haha, but otherwise it's perfect.
Nice music, humor and mood but the gameplay is really lacking. The player needs much more feedback from every aspect of the game.
I liked that there were different creatures you could start with.
How on Earth did you test this during the 48 hours? I'm guessing the guy moved faster during development; I was sure wishing he moved faster for me!
As others have said, the music is really good but since it's the only song, it gets repetitive towards the end.
I would have liked some kind of game over screen after rescuing Benn's cat. If there was more to do I didn't find it. The subliminal message is pretty funny. Seems to have worked, too.
Loved the community references! The graphics are great and it's really polished and fun. Overall, very impressive! Kudos!
Great use of the theme! It's a fun game too. I agree with the people who've said that the difficulty ramps up too fast and the sound effects are a little bit loud and annoying, and autotracker music is... well it's better than nothing!
I liked the graphics and the controls were nice and responsive, once you get used to keyboard + mouse. One thing that really irked me was that your game doesn't capture the mouse, so I would often click away from it by accident and die.
Overall, this is a very solid and fun entry!